The Hunger for Ecstasy

Sacred sexuality honors pleasures as a gift from God.

Sitting with my friend Roseanne in the darkening twilight, I ask her a question I’ve been asking many people lately: “What does sacred sexuality mean to you?” Roseanne hesitates, searching for the right words. “It’s not something you can force, but once in a while, you pass through it into something beyond, something transcendent. It’s like a great light. Life comes pouring into existence, and just for a second, you get a chance to look at it and see it happening.”

Roseanne, a mother and housewife in her early fifties, is neither a student of Tantra nor versed in new age thought. In fact, she seems an unlikely source of information on sacred sexuality. She was raised in a strict mormon family where sex was equated with sin. Yet the long-overlooked truth is that countless men and women feel a natural, intuitive reverence for sex as the place where “life comes pouring into existence.”